Prosopographic Database of 20th Century Georgia (PDG) has been funded by the Ilia State University (ISU) and its Institute of Linguistic Research to create a resource for scholars, students, and anyone else with an interest in 20th Century Georgia and Soviet history. The objective of the project has been to compile a prosopographical dataset for Pre-Soviet and Soviet Georgia that is as comprehensive and accessible as possible given the available resources.
PDG was created using PHP - a general-purpose programming language. The Database Management System (DBMS) is established on a relational data model based on the mathematical concept of multiple relations. It is a collection of tables that are logically related to each other.
The database is structured around the person as the main actor of prosopographic research, the source attached to it, and the factoid registered according to that source. The factoid itself, combines several important moments, such as content, participants, date and place. Each component of the database (source, person, fact) is divided by typology.
Sources
The sources used are divided into archival documents, periodicals, books and digital resources. When registering a source, we fill in the related metadata, which is mainly based on the Dublin Core metadata unification standard. The areas of interest for our research are:
- Source name,
- Type,
- Date,
- Issue number,
- Number of pages,
- Page,
- Place of publication,
- Language,
- Publisher,
- Place stored,
- Cipher,
- Comment,
- Link to the source.
Persons
Person types are created according to research interest. When registering a person, we are covering fields as:
- Name of the person,
- Sex,
- Activities and/or profession,
- Alphabetical order.
Places
While working on this type of record, we are interested in information regarding the name of the place, its description and a related note (if any). Once the researcher has identified the name mentioned in the archival document, he/she can mark the corresponding coordinates on the map (indicating latitude and longitude). This allows us to take to another stage the "geography of events" of the factoids described in the database.
Factoids
When registering the types of factoids, we consider:
- Name,
- Authorship,
- Position,
- Organization,
- Personal relationship,
- Education,
- Event,
- Ownership,
- Personal Information,
- Status,
- Death,
- Conviction.
When registering a factoid, the researcher prepares its brief, uninterrupted content. Such an approach allows us to get acquainted with the information in the source as close as possible to the original. Other factual metadata include fields such as source, fact type, date, place, related persons. It should be noted that one fact can be linked to several persons and/or places at the same time.
